A Lost City Rises From Its Grave

Herakleion is not Atlantis--the legend of Atlantis is much older--but their stories are eerily similar.

A thriving seaport at the mouth of the Nile, Herakleion was a small but prosperous city, the major entryway into Egypt. Its residents were cultured and cosmopolitan as a result of contact with the foreign merchants and seamen who passed through regularly. A major temple in the city was dedicated to the god Amun, who gave the pharaohs their legal right to rule Egypt.

And then, in the blink of an eye, Herakleion disappeared. Sometime in the 1st century BC, it was struck by a major earthquake that leveled its buildings, swamped the ships in its harbor, killed most of its residents and forced the rest to flee, leaving their valued possessions.

For two millenniums, the remains lay hidden under silt and 30 feet of water nearly four miles off the coast of Alexandria in the Bay of Aboukir, an underwater version of the Roman city of Pompeii. Then, last summer, French underwater archeologist Franck Goddio announced that he had discovered the remains of a city he presumed to be Herakleion.

Preliminary surveys revealed the walls of buildings, sophisticated statuary and hundreds of relics.

Earlier this month, Goddio’s team returned and performed a more thorough search, he said, and the results are astounding scholars. The team has found the Great Temple of Herakleion; a black granite slab or stele inscribed with the word Herakleion; the remains of 10 ships in the harbor; and thousands of other artifacts, including jewelry, coins, vases and personal effects.

“History is materializing in our hands,” Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni said at the news conference announcing the find. He called it “a dream come true.”

The inscription at the base of the black stele mandates that the slab be erected at “Herakleion-Thonis.” It is the first clear proof that the lost city is, indeed, the near-mythical Herakleion.

Although it is little known to modern scholars, the city was famous throughout the ancient world. The Greek historian Diodor wrote that Heracles (known among the Romans as Hercules), the son of the god Zeus, dammed a Nile flood and saved the people along the river’s shores. In gratitude, the people built him a temple and named their town after him.

According to another Greek historian, Herodotus, Helen of Troy and her lover Paris fled to Herakleion to escape the wrath of Helen’s husband, Menelaus, but were turned away by Thonis, the watchman at the entrance of the Nile who had moral qualms.

A somewhat different spin on that story, recounted by the 6th century Greek historian Stesichorus, says that the ancient Greeks were tricked into believing that Helen was at Troy in a cunning ploy by the gods to incite a war that would reduce Troy’s burgeoning population. In reality, Stesichorus claimed, Helen sat out the war in Herakleion.

Goddio has found no evidence of Helen, but his new discoveries are fantastic in their own right.

One of his first finds is the Great Temple of Herakleion. The remains of thick stone walls mark the boundaries of the temple. Near the crumbled walls, the team found three colossal statues of pink granite that had presumably toppled in the earthquake.

Two of the statues represent an as-yet-unidentified pharaoh and his queen. The third is of Hapi, the Nile god of flooding.

Inside the temple is a monumental monolithic shrine, or naos, made of pink granite and inscribed with ancient hieroglyphics. The upper part is still illegible, but a preliminary translation of segments of the lower part indicates that this was, indeed, the Temple of Herakleion.

Scholars such as archeologist Manfred Clauss of Frankfurt University hope that the eventual deciphering of the stele will reveal much more. “In view of the fact that antique texts tell us next to nothing about Herakleion-Thonis, every individual find, every scrap of information, is highly welcome.”

Perhaps even more impressive is the 6 1/2-foot-tall black granite stele, which is an almost exact duplicate of another found in 1899 in the town of Nokratj (Naukratis in Greek). Such duplication is unprecedented in Egyptology. The Stele of Naukratis, which now sits in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, recounts a decree by Pharaoh Nektanebos I, the founder of the 30th Dynasty, who ascended to the throne in November 380 BC.

That decree enacted a 10% tax on Greek handicrafts and goods in Nokratj and Thonis, with the proceeds going to a proposed temple of the Goddess Neith. The inscription ends: “Then His Majesty said: ‘Let this be set on this stele erected in Nokratj on the bank of the Anu Canal. . . .’ ”

The newly discovered stele is identical to that in the Cairo museum with one exception. At the end, it says: “Then His Majesty said, ‘Let this be set on this stele erected at the entrance of the Sea of the Greeks at Herakleion-Thonis.’ ”

Goddio’s team also identified the site of Herakleion’s harbor, which contained the wreckage of at least 10 ships huddled together in a manner suggesting that they were swamped by a tidal wave accompanying the earthquake.

Everywhere the team members have looked in the underwater city, they have found artifacts. All date from the 1st century BC or earlier. Most are in remarkable condition despite the 2,000 years they spent underwater. Among the discoveries are gold earrings, bracelets, hairpins, rings, combs, a fine glazed Greek bowl, an incense burner and hundreds of coins.

And they have only begun to scratch the surface, Goddio said.

Goddio’s expedition was sponsored by the Hilti Foundation and the Discovery Channel, which is producing a film about Herakleion to be shown later this year. Further information is available at https://www.franckgoddio.com.

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Maugh can be reached at thomas.maugh@latimes.com.